I find it more interesting as an indication of the *direction* and *emphasis* of studies for high achieving high school students back then.

Some items:

1) History seems mostly to have been ancient Greek and Roman history. The test cares about Pericles, Leonidas, Lysander, Gaul, etc. No questions about, for example, the US Revolutionary War or the Napoleonic Wars or China or ...

2) *NO* science questions at all! Not even Newtonian physics.

3) *Lots* of Greek and Latin. This ties in with (1): the focus was on ancient Greece and Rome.

4) The math is interesting. At least one question that a 6th or 7th grader today should be able to answer (184800/1180410). More focus on computation that we would do today (no one learns how to extract a root manually anymore). A very solid focus on Algebra, Proof based Geometry and Trig (seems to compare well to today), but *nothing* on Calculus. My guess is that a good percentage of modern Harvard students take Calculus in high school.

5) No explicit writing section. I guess they figured that it would be covered by the history essay questions.

6) No "modern literature." I don't know if this is tested for today, but it is certainly taught. Did high school kids back in the 1860s read modern (for their time) literature? Dante's Inferno, for example. Or Don Quixote?

I teach high school math and can tell you that most of the math questions our students couldn't answer. NCTM Principles and Standards pretty much wiped out extensive geometry proofs in lieu of coordinate geometry. Although my students could calculate the roots manually, we spend a few days on that because it highlights to them the need for pen and paper calculation skills. They have fun with it, we make it a contest of sorts :)